You have a great artist in your midst, perhaps
the greatest of these times, and you don’t know it. Picasso, addressing feckless 20th-century Italians, was talking about Mario Sironi. It was a peculiar tribute,
coming from a man who belonged to the Communist party until the day he died. While
Sironi, on the other hand, was a believing Fascist even before1921, when he
began working as graphic artist for Mussolini’s paper, Il Popolo d'Italia and the review Gerarchia. He even adhered to the Republic of Salò, the
German-backed Italian puppet state of 1943-45, and that was much more of a
minority camp than Fascism ever was.

For a taste of this political outlier—and yes,
great painter—I recommendSironi 1885-1961 show at the Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome until February 8, 2015. There
are ninety paintings, graphic works and sketches for murals neatly organized to
follow the artist’s life path: born in 1885, studies in

engineering, a nervous
breakdown, art school, meeting Boccioni and Balla, Futurism, the Novecento, bleak
urban landscapes, a brief Metaphysical phase, Fascist illustration, publicity
for automaker Fiat, an Expressionist turn, followed by the huge murals commissioned
by Mussolini for new Fascist public buildings in Milan and Rome.

Things looked bad for Sironi when the Liberation came on April 25, 1945. He took the road out of
Milan toward Como and Switzerland, like many Fascists who feared partisan
reprisals, and not wrongly. On foot, his dog on a leash by his side, Sironi was
stopped at a partisan checkpoint, and only when the poet and children’s writer
(and partisan) Gianni Rodari stepped in, was he saved from being shot. After
the war, Sironi continued painting, and the vein of melancholy that colors
everything he produced seems to have deepened into something like despair.
There was no place for a man like him in a postwar Italy where all the artists
and intellectuals were anti-Fascists.

This exhibit, the
first in Italy dedicated to Sironi in twenty years, was curated by art
historian Elena Pontiggia, who provides a very useful biographical framework to
hang the artwork on, both in a short film and the good wall quotes.

This
doesn’t quite compensate for the fact that not many of Sironi’s greatest
paintings are on

display, or that this show is much smaller than that of 1994,
which had 400
artworks. But Pontiggia does bring out a crucial fact: that
Sironi was a life-long depressive, a man of melancholy who it would seem should
have been quite unsuited to the Fascist regime’s celebration of might and
right.

Even as a young man Sironi would close himself up in his rooms, seeing
no-one, drawing obsessively. “He’ll copy a Greek head 20 or 25 times!!!” reported Boccioni (exclamation marks his). The
Futurists disapproved of antiquated art.

Urban Landscape, 1922

Yet Sironi’s most powerful
works are those that don’t celebrate Fascism, modernity, or industry. His urban
landscapes, some of them painted in the early 1920s, others after World War II, are
haunting, and haunted. When in 1922 he produced one of several paintings titled
Urban Landscape, Sironi was staying
alone in a cheap hotel in Milan, too poor to bring his new wife there to live
with him. Dusty white and brick-colored industrial buildings, a great black swath
of train track, a tiny tram and a tiny truck. The only thing that looks animate
in the composition is the lowering green and grey sky.

The Yellow Truck, 1918

In another cityscape
shown here, an ashy black truck stands immobile where two utterly empty streets
of factories and warehouses intersect. There is no life or movement in the
painting, just beautiful volumes. Once again, only the sky is alive, with big
brushstrokes of smoke and cloud.

The Yellow Truck, 1918, is another work from this period. Big
rough brushstrokes, in part painted on newsprint, it suggests a Futurist
enthusiasm for the vehicle itself that is utterly absent in urban scenes done even
a few years later.

Urban Landscape, 1920

In another urban landscape painted in 1920, a hard brown
wall hides what seems to be a construction site. Again, the night sky is
roiling overhead. Sironi is no longer celebrating the dynamism of the machine
that was Futurism’s trademark. The only thing that’s dynamic is the air. When it comes to the
work he did in the 1930s, Fascism’s heyday, the show tries to persuade us that
although he worked for the cause, his murals and wall decorations (here, sketches
for his mosaic Justice Between Law and
Force in the Milan Court of Assizes) were never propaganda for Fascism. But
like so many efforts to rescue Sironi from his politics, this doesn’t really
ring true. Fascism was not just Blackshirts and castor oil; it was a political
creed based on just the kind of myths that Sironi produced in his large
allegorical murals. They embody a kind of immobilism, an image of the best of
all possible worlds that need never change. Sironi was happy to accept those
mural commissions because he wanted to make art for the people, not for
bourgeois sitting rooms. But that, too, was a thread of Fascism.

Urban Landscape, 1922

My Funeral, 1960

After the war, Sironi
continued to paint, and there are several more gloomy cityscapes here, often
painted in a thick impasto of brown, blue and white, that are very striking. He
died in 1961, not before producing a small tempera work, My Funeral, in which a tiny hearse in one corner of the picture is
followed by a tiny handful of mourners. “Let us hope that after so many storms,
so many gales, so much bestial suffering,” he wrote, “that there will
nevertheless be a port for this miserable heart to find peace and quiet."

Fifty years later, his reputation as an artist has been largely detached
from his role as a Fascist, but you couldn’t exactly say he rests in peace.